The Doctor Is Sick (28 page)

‘My watch?' said incredulous Edwin. ‘How on earth did that get there?' The clergyman held it close to Edwin's eyes. It ticked away as a naughty cat, on its return from long absence from home, will purr away unperturbed by persons' past perturbations. It was his watch all right.

‘Get there?' echoed the clergyman. ‘Well, it might be unwise, even blasphemous, to postulate thaumaturgy as an explanation. It would seem more reasonable to suppose that you yourself put it there. Or somebody, not divine, put it there for you.'

‘What,' asked Edwin, ‘is Spindrift?'

‘Spindrift? Dear me, all these questions. Spray, I should have supposed, drifting in from the sea. There's a poem by Kipling, I believe, that uses the word rather finely. “Something something something shall fail not from the
face of it, something something spindrift and the fulmar flying free”. A poem,' explained the clergyman, ‘as you may have divined, about the sea.' He chuckled oldly.

‘Is it also a detergent or a washing-machine or anything like that?'

‘I have my washing sent to the laundry,' said the clergyman, rather distantly. ‘Why, may I ask, do you ask?'

‘Oh, it's nothing,' said Edwin, ‘really.'

‘Well, I'm glad we've had this little chat,' said the clergyman. Edwin looked sharply at him, to see whether he was sitting on a water-closet. ‘Unless, of course, you have any other question to put to me,' he said humorously. ‘Forgive me,' he added, ‘I don't, of course, mean that if you have such a question I shall cease to be glad. These formulae one uses – quite meaningless. Words are treacherous things.'

‘Do you think,' asked Edwin slowly, ‘a man is ever justified in leaving his wife?'

‘No,' answered the clergyman promptly. ‘We are told that we are to forgive unto seventy times seven.' That disposed of that. He got up with arthritic difficulty from the bedside chair. ‘If you'd like prayers, you know,' he said, embarrassed, ‘or anything of that sort, I should be glad to, that is to say, I should be very happy to——'

‘You're very kind,' said Edwin.

‘I do believe you've been playing a little joke on me,' said the clergyman, with Christian forbearance. ‘I see now from your temperature chart that Spindrift is, actually, your own name. Ah, I see. A sort of riddle, really. Well, good-bye. Sprindrift, spindrift,' he muttered genially to himself as he moved on.

Edwin could eat little dinner (shepherd's pie with extra potatoes – mashed, sauté, one baked). He was thinking of what he could say to Sheila if, of course, she came. He could forgive her, naturally, but forgiveness would be to her quite outside the terms of reference, presumptuous as well, for she would believe there was nothing to forgive. Perhaps it was really up to him to ask her for forgiveness, for wives did not usually go around committing fornication and adultery if they were happy at home. All this went back a long way and, he supposed, everything was ultimately his responsibility. What he proposed to do now was already fraught with its potential hangover of guilt. But that should be cancelled out by the guilt she ought to feel and never had felt when committing the sin of hurting him (for she had hurt him, horribly, and it was no good her saying that he had no right to feel hurt). He proposed to leave her because, in failing him when he'd needed her most, she'd given the lie to her own vaunted creed: being together was the important thing, the other thing didn't in the least matter. Leaving her, of course, would merely mean telling her to get out of his life. They were homeless in England, their few chattels were in Moulmein. Edwin was quite convinced that he would not be going back to Moulmein, quite convinced after everything that had happened. The future would have to be replanned when Sheila had been removed from the future.

But, he wondered, had those fantastic things really happened? They must have happened, they still possessed in memory strong reality-tone. The clang of the CAGE chord in that club; Railton's polished trumpet catching the light from the stage-spot; an unsqueezed comedo on the upper lip of Harry Stone. And, above everything, that
ghastly snorting busy nakedness, the train coming into the station, Sheila's high demented dying voice.
That
had most certainly happened. And, if that had happened, everything else had happened. But how could anything be proved or disproved? People had such a weak hold on reality, remembering only what they wished to remember. And even with the more cultivated – Railton, Chasper, Aristotle Thanatos – there would be a deliberate withholding, a desire not to add the humiliation of the record to the humiliation of the fact.

Aristotle Thanatos. Edwin began to sweat and pant fearfully. Had he ever really known a man with that name? He racked and sifted his memory for Aristotle Thanatos. It was the sort of name a man might make up, like Mr Eugenides the Symrna merchant. Would any Greek be called Thanatos? He tried to relive fragments of his university life, to recall particular scenes, encounters. He seemed to achieve, at the expense of a splitting head, a picture of himself with three or four other men in the pub across the road from the Men's Union – the College Arms – discussing something gravely. Aesthetics, perhaps, or the Fall of France, imminent call-up into the forces or the precise definition of a technical term, the nature of baroque or something. He seemed to see, on the very edge of the group, a plump swart man, maturer than his companions. Edwin looked more closely and found that to be an Egyptian student of technology called Hamid. Aristotle Thanatos. Somebody met in his American post-graduate year? Such a name might well be found in America. He saw the speaker of modern Greek shambling about the ward in dressing-gown and slippers, dribbling, pretending to be a doctor, clumsily nodding over temperature charts.
Edwin called him over by shouting: ‘Eh!' The man came quickly, blundering into wheelchairs, catching his thigh on bedrails.

‘Name,' said Edwin. ‘Your name.' He called up gobbets of Greek from the past. ‘Kyrie. Onoma.'

‘Johnny,' dribbled the man promptly. ‘Johnny Dikiko-ropoulos. Cyprus. Turk man no bloody good.'

‘Dunatos,' said Edwin. ‘Is it possible onoma Thanatos?' The Cypriot immediately began to cry.

‘Damn it,' said Edwin angrily. ‘I'm not saying anything about death or you dying. Is the name Thanatos possible? Are there any Greeks of your acquaintance with that name? Mr Thanatos.
Mr Thanatos
. Come back, blast you.' But the Cypriot went off blubbering. There were cries of Shame, insulting the poor bugger like that, just because he's a poor bloody foreigner, oughtn't to be allowed.

‘You,' said the ward sister, ‘are going to have a sedative. We can't have the whole ward disturbed by one patient. You're too lively, you are.'

‘But,' said Edwin, ‘I've got a visitor coming. My wife.'

‘No visitors for you. You're not ready for visitors yet, carrying on like that. You're going to have the screens round you.' She was a thin fierce woman with very old-fashioned spectacle-frames.

‘But I must see my wife,' said Edwin.

‘You'll see your wife all in good time. But not tonight.' She wheeled across the squeaking bed-screens, shutting Edwin from the lively sick world, ‘Time enough to see your wife when you're better.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

‘Well,' said Sheila, ‘now you seem to be all right. Everybody was worried about you, you know.' She sat, darkly pretty, in a black wide skirt with a lime-coloured sweater, her fur coat sitting on her shoulders. It was the following evening. He felt rested, felt that he seemed to be all right. And various healing forces had conspired to a mood of forgiveness. He forgave himself. He forgave the past few days and all of the past beyond that. He forgave Sheila, but that was a secret, a note passed from himself to himself.

‘Why was everybody worried?' asked Edwin, taking Sheila's hand. It was a cold hand, but the autumn night was cold. It tapped at the window, crying its cold.

‘Yes, I don't suppose you'd know much about it, would you?' said Sheila. ‘I shouldn't think there's much point in telling you about it, really.'

‘After I fell down, you mean?'

‘Oh, you remember falling, do you? They decided to postpone the operation. And then, so they say, you had some sort of post-operational shock. You were in a coma, apparently. I tried to get in several times to see you, but they wouldn't let me.'

‘And how is Nigel?'

‘Nigel? That idiot? He was a phoney, if ever there was one. But why do you ask? Why don't you ask how I am?'

‘I assumed you were all right. You look all right. You never looked better.'

‘I never felt so cold.' She shivered a little and pulled her
fur coat more warmly round her shoulders, disengaging her lightly held hand to do so. She did not give her hand back to Edwin's hand.

‘And how,' asked Edwin shyly, ‘is the other man? Nigel's successor?'

‘You seem very interested in my boy friends,' said Sheila. ‘As for how Nigel's successor is, I'm afraid I don't know. Or rather I do know. Nigel's successor is suffering from a severe attack of non-existence.'

‘Oh, come off it,' said Edwin, suddenly weary, lolling his bound head on the pillow. ‘This is unlike you. I know all about Nigel's successor, don't I? Although I want to forget all about him as quickly as possible.'

‘Why did you ask about him then? Look, Edwin, I don't have to say this, as you know, but if you think I've been spending this time in London on bouts of promiscuous love-making, you're very much mistaken. I went about with Nigel for a day or two because I thought he was amusing. Then I found he wasn't amusing. He also seemed to have a strong aversion to chlorophyll. He stank. In both senses.'

‘Did you get my laundry back from him?'

‘No, I didn't, but that doesn't matter.' Edwin looked hard at her. No successor to Nigel, eh? She had never lied before. Edwin said:

‘I'm a bit confused in my mind. I don't like to say you're lying, but I think you are. The trouble is that, at the moment, I'm the last person in the world to say that this happened and that happened. I don't know. But I have a powerful impression that certain things happened to me that, quite possibly, may not have happened at all.'

‘Oh,' said Sheila, ‘anaesthetics, coma. You've been quite
ill.' She gave him a hard look back. ‘You're the last person in the world, as you quite rightly say, to start talking about anyone lying. I know you don't really mean what you're saying now. Lying's a nasty word.'

‘What I meant,' said Edwin, ‘was that I didn't want you of all people to join the select group who are keeping silent about what I did, or think I did, during those three days, if it was three days. I know I was ill, but I still want to straighten out fact from fantasy, if there was any fantasy. ‘If,' he added, ‘there was any fact.' She looked puzzled. ‘A question of ontology,' said Edwin. ‘We can't go through the world in a state of confusion about reality.'

‘Oh, there are worse things than that,' said Sheila. ‘Anyway, you're cured now. The operation was successful, so they tell me.' She spoke flatly, without joy or relief.

‘Tell me the truth,' said Edwin urgently. ‘For God's sake tell me what happened.'

‘I can only tell you what I've been told. You passed out and hurt yourself. They decided to postpone the operation.'

‘What day was this?'

‘Oh, how do I know what day? All days are alike, except Sunday, and Sunday contrives to be even duller than the week-days.'

‘So,' said Edwin, ‘I didn't see you in bed with another man?'

‘No,' said Sheila, ‘you certainly didn't. I'd never be such a fool as to put myself in that position, not after that fuss you kicked up in Moulmein. And Jeff and I were not really doing anything on that occasion. It was then I realised that there was something wrong with your brain.'

‘And how about the Stone twins and the Kettle Mob and
the competition for the best bald head in Greater London?'

‘The Stone twins most certainly exist. That competition sounds rather a charming idea. But what is this Kettle Mob? What does it do – mend kettles?'

‘They sell dud watches,' said Edwin. ‘Which reminds me. How has my own watch- or Jeff Fairlove's, as you tell me it is – suddenly managed to come back again? I could have sworn that that man 'Ippo stole it.'

‘So he did,' said Sheila. ‘Apparently he sold it to a man called Bob Something-or-other, a man I met in that horrible club of the Stone twins. I saw him wearing it and I got it back. I brought it here while you were still wandering in imaginary worlds.'

‘How did you get it back?'

‘I got it back.'

‘Did this man Bob ask you if you were kinky?'

‘As a matter of fact, he did. How did you know?'

‘That's what I mean,' said Edwin with energy. ‘You see, that's one thing that
must
have happened. I mean, my being kidnapped by this Bob and being made to whip him. I can't have imagined that, I just can't.'

‘You seem to have imagined quite a lot,' said Sheila. ‘When I came with this watch I came also with Charlie -you remember him, the window cleaner. It's quite possible that, even though you were dead out, something registered. I told Charlie the story of the watch.'

Implausible, implausible. Why did she lie? Why didn't she help him to get at the truth? What was she trying to hide?

‘Now,' said Sheila, ‘if you're so keen on getting to grips with reality, I'd better tell you about my meeting with Chasper.'

‘I suppose he really knows that I stole his hat,' said Edwin. ‘Did he mention it?'

‘He had other things to talk about than hats,' said Sheila. ‘There was the whole question of your going back to Moulmein.'